seeing Cameron’s tweedy back disappear, but she banished it. I must not fear anything, she reminded herself. Or I will fail.
The major looked unenthusiastic. Eve guessed he did not share Captain Cameron’s preference for female recruits. “The first room on the second floor is yours. Report back here in fifteen minutes.” And as easily as that, the secret world opened.
The Folkestone course lasted two weeks. Two weeks in stuffy low-ceilinged rooms with windows sealed against the May warmth. Rooms full of students who did not look like spies, learning strange and sinister things from men who did not look like soldiers.
Despite Captain Cameron’s recruiting preference, Eve found herself the only woman. The instructors overlooked her, eyes going to the men in the room before they let Eve answer anything, but that didn’t trouble her because it gave her time to evaluate her classmates. Just four of them, and how different they were from each other. That was the thing that struck Eve most. Any recruiting poster for the fighting troops showed you a line of identical Tommies, stalwart and sturdy, faceless in their similarity. That was the ideal soldier: a line, a regiment, a battalion of strong men all exactly alike. But a recruitment poster for spies, she realized, would merely show you a line of people, all different, who did not look like spies.
There was a burly Belgian with a graying beard; two Frenchmen, one with a Lyonnais accent and the other with a limp; and a slender English boy burning with such incandescent hatred for the Huns that he almost glowed. He won’t be any good, Eve judged. No self-control—and she wasn’t sure about the limping Frenchman either; his hands balled into fists whenever he encountered the least frustration. The whole course was an exercise in frustration, fiddly skills to be learned with infinite patience: the picking of locks, the writing of codes, and the learning of ciphers. The various types of invisible ink, how it could be made and how it could be read. How to read and draw maps, how to conceal messages—the list went on and on. The Belgian swore softly when they learned how to compile reports on the smallest possible scraps of rice paper, because his huge fists were like hams. But Eve quickly mastered the system of tiny letters, each no bigger than a comma on a typewriter. And her instructor, a lean Cockney who had barely looked at her since she arrived, smiled at her work and began to watch her more closely.
Just a fortnight, and Eve wondered how much it was possible to change in two weeks. Or was it not change, but becoming what she already was? She felt like she was being burned, sloughing away every extraneous layer, every scrap of ballast from mind or body that could possibly weigh her down. Each morning she woke with alacrity, tossing the covers aside and springing from bed, her mind one long hungry scream for what the day had to offer. She manipulated her fingers around those tiny scraps of paper, those deft manipulations that would persuade a lock to give up its secrets, and she thrilled with more sheer, fierce pleasure the first time she sensed a lock’s tumblers click than she had ever felt when a man tried to kiss her.
I was made for this, she thought. I am Evelyn Gardiner, and this is where I belong.
Captain Cameron came to see her at the end of the first week. “How’s my pupil?” he asked, strolling unannounced into the stuffy, makeshift classroom.
“Very well, Uncle Edward,” Eve said demurely.
His eyes laughed. “What’s that you’re practicing?”
“Hiding messages.” How to swiftly slit a seam on her cuff and poke in a tiny rolled message, and how to quickly pluck it back out. It took speed and deft fingers, but Eve had both.
The captain leaned against the edge of the table. He was in uniform today, the first time she’d seen him in khaki, and it suited him. “How many places can you hide a message, in what you’re wearing now?”
“Cuffs, hems, fingertips of a glove,” Eve recited. “Pinned into the hair, of course. Rolled around the inside band of a ring, or inside the heel of a s-shoe—”
“Mmm, better forget that last one. I hear the Fritzes have caught on to the shoe-heel trick.”
Eve nodded, filing that away. She unrolled her tiny blank message and began swiftly threading it through the hem of her handkerchief instead.